Electric Comics Theory

Folks who have been paying attention to the news have likely already caught wind of the ‘major new digital comics research project’ I teased back in February. Electricomics was officially announced to the world at the end of May although I’ve been attached to the project for a year prior to that, so it’s lovely to finally be able to tell you all about it here at E-merl. Essentially, Electricomics is a digital comics research project born out of the mind of comics legend Alan Moore and funded by the NESTA Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.

We’ve got a whole load of talented comics folk on board to create our initial proof-of-concept comics, Ocasta Studios providing the tech know-how and myself and Alison Gazzard acting as the project’s two research partners. Together we’re all trying to figure out what makes digital comics tick and then create an open source toolkit for their creation. You can find out lot more detail by taking a browse of the Electricomics website and I’d like to particularly draw your attention to this recent article by myself and Alison that lays out some of the digital comics theory at the bedrock of the project.

Speaking of theory, I thought it was well past time that I opened a section of E-merl devoted to it. And thus, the Theory page was born! Check it out to get a feel for the highlights of my comic scholarship over the last few years of my doctoral study – hopefully it’ll prove to be a useful resource for anyone else researching digital or architecturally mediated comics. In a similar spirit, I also took the time to get the Consulting page up to date with details of my recent consultancy and exhibitions (which hopefully will prove equally useful for people who want to hire me to do comics things for money).